EGHS's Charlotte Palmer Wins Essay Contest

The students, mostly ninth graders, had been called to an assembly in the auditorium Wednesday morning, March 7, without knowing why. Then they found out: one of them had written an award-winning essay on investing. Students looked at each other and around. Whoever it was had written an essay ranked number one in the state, number five in the country. 

And the winner was ... Charlotte Palmer, a dark-haired ninth grader sitting in in the back. The auditorium erupted in applause as Charlotte made her way to the stage to be congratulated by Elizabeth Reidel, vice president of Securities Industries and Financial Management Association (SIFMA), which ran the InvestWrite contest.

Charlotte and other members of EGHS teacher Pat Page's business class had been challenged to analyze an investment scenario and, thinking critically, write a long-term financial plan based on that analysis. Charlotte, one of 20,000 students across the country who participated, based her essay on the potential for investing in toy company Mattel (her winning essay is attached, right).

She wrote the essay in November and said on Wednesday that she hadn't thought about it much afterwards. "Mrs. Page told us none of the kids made it that far," said Charlotte. Actually, Page found out about Charlotte's acheivement in January. She alerted Charlotte's parents and older sister, Alice, who played courier, and they waited. Until Wednesday.

Surrounded by her parents, James and Ellen Palmer, and her older sister, a smiling Charlotte said she wrote about Mattel because she'd researched it for the class's stock market game.

"It was around Christmastime so I figured I would invest in stocks that would have a lot of sales around Christmastime," she said. "I picked Mattel and that helped because we had a very short period of time to work on the stock market game."

As for a future in business, Charlotte's uncertain.

"I really don't know what I want to do for a career," she said. "I might do something in business or I wanted to be a novelist and I enjoy the sciences as well."